Everything you need to know about Gran Turismo 7.

Gran Turismo 7 is the seventh installment in a long running racing game series. This iteration is being put together by Polyphony Digital in conjunction with Sony. This is the seventh major title in the series but is actually the thirteenth game in the entire, long running series. This game is yet another in the series that is being overseen by Kazunori Yamauchi who helped get the original Gran Turismo off the ground. Now serving as President of Polyphony Digital, the producer has actually had a pretty impressive racing career himself. This has allowed him to have a special insight into how to make car racing video games as realistic as possible.

Development

Unlike other big time games, Gran Turismo 7 wasn’t announced at a major press event. Instead, In an interview with Japanese magazine Famitsu (and translated by Polygon), series creator Kazunori Yamauchi mentioned that GT7 would be coming to the PlayStation 4 console, possibly “in a year or two.” That was in 2013 and the game is not expected to launch now until 2016 or 2017. Yamauchi also mentioned that it will be based on the same physics engine that Gran Turismo 6 uses.

In a later interview, the famed Gran Turismo producer did mention that it likely wouldn’t be 2016 or 2017 until the game will be released. He also made comments in the later interview that it has become quite a bit easier to develop the game on the PS4 compared to the PS3. “Everything will be running naturally,” Yamauchi said in the interview. “PS3 was much, much more difficult. The high quality of data that we have being rendered on the PS4 I think is going to make an incredible difference.”

The producer added that he had a vision for Gran Turismo 7 and that vision is to do everything they couldn’t do in Gran Turismo 6. “We want to make it very Gran Turismo. By that I mean it’s going to be a game that matches the very era that we live in, in 2015 or 2016.” It’s not entirely clear what that comment means but it seems to indicate that the game will be taking advantage of all the technology that is available.

One of the ways in which the game will set itself apart from Gran Turismo 6 is that the game will have better crash physics. In a June interview, the producer said that his company, Polyphony is taking impact simulation very seriously. Yamauchi said he and his team are working to solve many of the problems that other entries in the series have had with physics. He added again that working with the PlayStation 4 will make changing and improving the physics of this game much easier than when the company was using earlier versions consoles. In September of 2015, Polyphony reportedly brought in even more developers for its staff. In total, the report indicates there were 13 AI engineers and a graphics engineer brought on board to help with bringing the game to market.

Polyphony Digital took on Mike Caviezel as its Senior Audio Lead in the spring of 2015. Caviezel has long been heralded as one of the industry’s finest ‘sound guys’, and he will be bringing all his expertise to GT7. The audio expert had previously worked on other car racing games such as the Forza series. The series had come under fire in prior years for not having very realistic sound effects for the cars as they raced around the countryside and the tracks and Caviezel was likely brought in specifically to add a new air of realism to the way the game sounds.

Tracks & Cars

The tracks and cars that are to be included in Gran Turismo 7 have not been confirmed yet. Every different iteration in this series has brought a number of cars from the previous version of the game and then added new cars. The tracks are done in a similar way. None of this information can be confirmed yet as Polyphony is still early enough in the development cycle that the company has not begun talking about what tracks will be used in Gran Turismo 7.

A 2014 interview from Yamauchi indicated that there are a number of standard cars that will be ported over to Gran Turismo 7 and that the Premium cars are the ones that will see quite a bit of change from the previous versions of the game. When there is a list of cars, if one can base that list off of previous versions, there will be more than 1,200 cars on the rather extensive list. The standard cars that can be expected to be included in Gran Turismo 7 actually go back much farther than the previous iteration. The standard cars that have been in the last few games in the series were originally spotted in Gran Turismo 4.

In that 2014 interview Yamauchi said “I doubt that we’ll be throwing away the standard cars. Each car has its own fans. So I think we’ll hang on to the archive. In the meanwhile, some of those cars we may be able to make into Premium cars as they become available – but basically we’re more focused on increasing the number of premium cars.” It’s possible the plan has changed since that point in time but it’s an approach the company has had for a number of different games in the series. The company has included more than 30 tracks in previous versions of the game and it is a safe bet to believe that same number is likely to be included in Gran Turismo 7.

Gameplay

While there isn’t a great deal known about the gameplay for Gran Turismo 7, there are a couple of features that are constant throughout the series. Players will be able to get behind the wheel of a ton of different cars. They will also be able to customize and craft some of these cars in order to make them perform better on the track and in the races. The gameplay will look similar to that of Gran Turismo 6 because the company is using the same engine, though it will be souped up for the PS4.

Note: This wiki will be updated once we have more information about the game